Process Consultation

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Understanding Facilitation

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Definitions of Process Consultation

Now, perhaps the best definition comes from the original developer himself,
Edgar Schein.

Process Consultation is the creation of a relationship with
the client that permits the client to perceive, understand, and act on the
process events that occur in the client’s internal and external environment
in order to improve the situation as defined by the client. -- Edgar Schein,
Process Consultation: Its role in organization
development, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Reading, Mass, 1969.

Schein stresses that the process consultant's role is one of helping groups,
rather than directing their members with expert advice. The focus is on the
group's processes, such as communication and leadership -- especially in areas
that members are not aware of, but that adversely affects them achieving their
goals. The process of process consultation generally follows that of action
research.

This definition aptly describes the unique nature of mutual collaboration between
the facilitator and client in process consultation:

Process consulting is a model of consultation based on mutual “helping
relationship” propounded by Edgar Schein. It all started as a practice
during the late twentieth century as a consulting work in which the consultant
works ‘with’ the client and not ‘for’ the client.
This constitutes the fundamental philosophy of process consulting. In process
consultation there is no one management expert who comes up with an off-the-shelf
solution for the client, rather the consultant and the client indulges into
a participatory process from diagnostics to implementation in finding out
a solution that specifically applies to the said client system organization.
The key aspects of mutual participation and specificity makes the process
consultant methodology a powerful management consultancy tool. -- ODPEDA
- the Open Encyclopedia of Organization Development